Atlas Genius Kicks Off Tour With Imagine Dragons

Atlas Genius will kick off a two-month US tour with Imagine Dragons on February 8 at The Marquee in Tempe, AZ. The run includes a show at New York City’s Roseland Ballroom (February 23), a performance at the House of Blues in Chicago (March 4) and a night at the Wiltern in Los Angeles (March 20). Atlas Genius will also play two shows at SXSW in Austin (March 13 & 14).

The Australian band has been touring the U.S. non-stop for the past four months with groups like Silversun Pickups, Wolf Gang and Animal Kingdom and will wrap up their 2012 run with a sold-out headlining show at Los Angeles’ Troubadour on December 11.While in L.A., the band performs on KCRW’s “Morning Becomes Eclectic” today and will make their U.S. television debut, performing “Trojans,” on Jimmy Kimmel Live on Wednesday, December 12.

“Trojans,” a Top 5 hit at Modern Rock radio and a Top 20 hit at Triple A, is the first single from the band’s debut album, When It Was Now, which will be released on February 19, 2013 via Warner Bros. Records. A pre-order for When It Was Now goes live this week at both iTunes and Amazon.

Atlas Genius wrote, recorded and produced When It Was Now themselves at a studio they built in their hometown of Adelaide, Australia. Once their studio was built, the first song that Atlas Genius finished was “Trojans.” After spending weeks tweaking it, they put “Trojans” on SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes and Australia’s Triple J Unearthed website. Then, they pretty much forgot about it.

“We began to think that music was a pipedream and we had gone back to university to pursue more realistic careers,” says lead singer Keith Jeffery. But as they crammed for their fall semester final exams, the blog Neon Gold discovered “Trojans” on the Triple J Unearthed site and wrote a post praising the song as sure to “invade your head, all dressed up in a clever disguise of earnest vocals riding a hooky riff.” Checking the band’s email account for the first time in over a month, they found their inbox being barraged by fans, record labels, booking agents and management companies from all over the world.

The band continued to write and record new songs in relative isolation in their studio as word on “Trojans” spread organically across the internet, with blog support leading to the song charting #1 on both Hype Machine and the We Are Hunted “Emerging Artist” Chart. SiriusXMAlt Nation found the song on a blog and started spinning “Trojans.” The song spent four straight weeks as the #1 requested track on their listener generated Alt-18 countdown in early 2012. “Trojans” began to sell over 1,500 tracks per week in the States and soon climbed to 45,000 downloads sold – all with zero promotional efforts from the still-unsigned band.

Atlas Genius signed to Warner Bros. Records in the spring of 2012 and quickly released the three-song EP Through The Glass in June, featuring new songs “Back Seat” and “Symptoms.” The band has released a variety of remixes for all three tracks through their SoundCloud page, including remixes by Lenno, Goldroom, Xaphoon Jones (of Chiddy Bang), Aislyn (of Passion Pit), Wild Cub, and Fred Falke. Each one charted on Hype Machine, with Lenno going to #1 and Goldroom and Xaphoon Jones going Top 5.

“Trojans” has slowly and steadily become a bonafide hit, selling over 100,000 singles to date.